Josh Brolin’s memoir presents a series of vignettes starring the actor as himself

Book Review From Under the Truck: A Memoir By Josh Brolin Harper: 240 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. One day in January 1985, 16-year-old Josh Brolin was in Los Angeles filming the climactic scene in his debut film, “The Goonies.” In the largest and deepest soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios, he and the other young actors who made up the eponymous gang were led backward, their hands over their eyes, down a ramp and into water. Brolin spent his early teenage years juggling two identities: At night he worked as a cook in an Italian restaurant; during the day he ran wild as a rebel without a cause, or a purpose, in the Cito Rats, “my misfit hive that I was at the epicenter of.” While his band of brothers crashed and burned, Brolin got a lifeline through his acting break. In one dated 1990, he recalls staying in a flophouse and aimlessly wandering the seedier streets and slums of Portland, Ore., on the off chance that Gus Van Sant might “discover” him and cast him in “My Own Private Idaho.” In a bleaker episode dated two years later, we find him living alone in a “rented cell” in New York City, bewailing his failures as a husband and father, and, shirtless and shoeless, buttonholing rising star Philip Seymour Hoffman in a subway station. One informative chapter comprises journal entries that chronicle the making of “The Goonies” and Brolin’s great comeback movie, “No Country for Old Men”.